Best programming and hacker quotes. Ever.
Curated by fellow hackers Jarmo Pertman & Andri Möll
If we believe in data structures, we must believe in independent (hence simultaneous) processing. For why else would we collect items within a structure? Why do we tolerate languages that give us the one without the other?
Alan J. Perlis
It won't be covered in the book. The source code has to be useful for something, after all...
Larry Wall
The function name should define everything the function does.
Anonymous
... what society overwhelmingly asks for is snake oil. Of course, the snake oil has the most impressive names — otherwise you would be selling nothing — like "Structured Analysis and Design", "Software Engineering", "Maturity Models", "Management Information Systems", "Integrated Project Support Environments" "Object Orientation" and "Business Process Re-engineering" (the latter three being known as IPSE, OO and BPR, respectively).
Edsger W. Dijkstra
Selecting a project due date before the requirements are properly gathered is like selecting which corner you want to paint yourself into, while simultaneously negating the doorway as a viable option.
Chris Ames
There are no significant bugs in our released software that any significant number of users want fixed.
Bill Gates
Lisp isn't a language, it's a building material.
Alan Kay
Mostly, when you see programmers, they aren't doing anything. One of the attractive things about programmers is that you cannot tell whether or not they are working simply by looking at them. Very often they're sitting there seemingly drinking coffee and gossiping, or just staring into space. What the programmer is trying to do is get a handle on all the individual and unrelated ideas that are scampering around in his head.
Charles M Strauss
We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil.
Donald Knuth
Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight.
Bill Gates